German Patent Application No. DE 10 220 782 A1 describes an emergency system for motor vehicles, including a driver monitoring system for detecting a driver's unfitness to drive, and including a control unit for the controlled deceleration of the vehicle if an unfitness to drive is detected, characterized in that the control unit is combined with a driver assistance system which includes a sensor system for detecting the surrounding traffic conditions. The systems used for detecting the biometric data may also be designed in such a way that they are able to automatically identify the driver. In this case, the follow-up mode is terminated when a driver change is detected.
Furthermore, German Patent Application No. DE 10 2014 212 758 A1 describes a method and a device used for identifying the driver of a vehicle. The biometric parameters which could be detected and which may be additionally utilized for identification are, for example, the fingerprint, the hand geometry, the facial geometry, the heart rate, the grip position (and force) on the steering wheel, and the weight or the weight distribution on the seat.
In addition, present-day eye-tracking systems are capable of automatedly detecting a head model (the relative position of all relevant facial landmarks) of a new person. This is carried out at the beginning of every driving operation. After the so-called head model has been initialized, these systems are able to identify and observe (track) the position of the head of the driver. If a driver change has been detected, it is uncertain, however, whether the driver has actually changed. The driver change cannot be correctly detected in system configurations in particular in which image-based “face identification” is not available. Consequently, the head model of the driver cannot be re-initialized, which results in a substantially poorer performance of the eye-tracking system.